


Proof Positive

by walbergr



Series: Proving Grounds [3]
Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: AU, Bill Adama Cameo Appearance, Established Relationship, F/M, Kara likes to tease, Lee is that good, Long-Distance Relationship, Relationship Negotiation, pre-mini
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-06
Updated: 2015-08-06
Packaged: 2018-04-13 06:59:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4512333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/walbergr/pseuds/walbergr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lee seeing her from space.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Proof Positive

**Author's Note:**

> All the thanks to Lanalucy for the beta!

Plugged in and strapped down in a launch tube, fifteen hours of obligations and duties filter through his head. The LSO crackles through his helmet, “Viper five-six-one-three/ _Columbia_ , pre-check.” 

The checks are routine but crisp as he follows the list down the window on his thigh. Every viper is a frakking death trap unless you know it front to back, and his name is on the side of the cockpit so he knows this one enough not to trust it. “Apollo, all green, copy.” 

“Apollo, clear forward, nav con green, interval check, thrust positive and steady. Mag-cat engaged.” The launch pushes him back into the seat and Spinout is on his wing. They’re pulsing through the void, Spin calling out just like they were trained “Six yaw,” when he fires his thrusters, perfect radio protocol, silent but for necessary information. CAP is a joke in peacetime, four vipers, one raptor, all but the most paranoid of COs trying to keep tylium burn down to boost training time. 

He watches dradis, empty. Nudges the stick slightly starboard, keeping the tightest radius that meets protocol. His eyebrow itches hopelessly, black space ahead, behind, below, above, starboard. Columbia at port, a hulking mass with just enough gravity to pull him in, and that slight tweak in his wrist as he pulls his ship out of its gravity, out of its gravity, out of its gravity for hours at a time. His fuel burn over the week is standing at ninety-two percent of standard. It’s only worth ten minutes at speed in formation pulling drills, but the grunt work requires just enough attention to be proud of, if not as attentive as maybe he should be.

When he hears, “Viper five-six-one-three/ _Columbia_ , you are cleared for approach.” It doesn’t feel like it’s been four hours, but then it never does.

“Copy Columbia, entering approach.” He hits the trap and auto-landing kicks in, settling the ship one leg at a time onto the deck. He gets pulled down on the hydraulics, waits for deck crew to unlatch his canopy, pulls off his helmet. The lights are bright as his eyes adjust. He swings a leg over the side of the ship onto the waiting ladder, and Cameron starts calling out: “Sap-nav.” 

“Down.”

“Dradis.”

“Black.” 

“Three greens.”

“Set.”

“Weapons.” 

“Safe.” He’s down the stairs, circling the plane, prodding at seals while Cameron marks down his responses. There is nothing special, no external damage, the ship is as pristine as it was when he took it out four hours ago. Cam hands him the clipboard, he initials for the fuel level, skims the list and signs. “Thanks.” 

“No problem LT.”

They walk to the post-flight station. His helmet is under his arm, and the itch on his eyebrow is back and his left hand wends up to scratch it. “I hear there’s a fresh shipment of ambrosia at the Deck P commissary.”

Lee chuckles. “Thanks for the tip,” and Cam hands him the post-flight, hangs up the clipboard and snaps off a sloppy salute as he swings back toward the deck. Lee hands the quartermaster his helmet, collar and gloves.

~ ~

He can almost hear her fingernails tapping on the stairway railing as he picks up the receiver. “Timely as always, Apollo.” There’s a wicked grin on her breath that rockets against his vertebrae and settles to quiver tightly just below his hip bones. He’s lucky it’s a Friday and they have time. Fridays with a horny Kara Thrace are good days. Tonight, her voice plummets immediately into dusky tones as she says hello, and he’s no more reticent. He double-checks there’s no port on the closet and shoves his BDUs past his hips. 

The first few times were awkward, a give and take of interruption and startlement and her constant reassurances that _it’s ok_ and _yes I’ll touch myself like that, and no it isn’t weird, and Lee seriously stop being such a prude and enjoy yourself because if this is all we get for the next five months I’m sure as frak going to enjoy it._

Then, with each subsequent relay, it’s gotten easier, more real. They’ve developed a shorthand of sorts, for how to touch, how they want to imagine each other. She knows when he says “Your back” he means that he’s hovering above her and when she says “Around” she means that she’s circling the head of his cock with her tongue or her fingertips. There’s panting and gasping and grunts and they nudge each other on and off course until they’re imagining close enough to the same scene.

Afterward, he only has the temerity to say “I miss you.” 

“Well get promoted and get more leave then, bigshot.” She laughs. 

It’s so like her, so ostentatious and startling that he responds in kind: “I have a twenty-four in a few weeks. You want to come out and meet me on the Ouranos Satellite, be my guest.” 

Her grin is audible as she begins a story about one of her nuggets that he challenges with one about the new XO and as the dull tone starts to sound she pauses what she was about to say and instead says “What’s the date for Ouranos?” He doesn’t say anything for a moment, is hit with an indescribable longing for the scent of her hair, the curve of her hip. Then she’s taking a step back “Never mind, I…” 

“P7, thirty-six, oh eight-hundred.” He says. Then the line is dead and everything inside him has been jostled. Because she hasn’t said she misses him, just makes a joke when he does and maybe there is a part of him that thought maybe this was convenient for her, that it was easy, that her fingertips didn’t pulse against her skin in quite the same way when she heard his voice. 

But maybe they do. 

~ ~

That Tuesday, instead of Kara clicking on at her usual time, it’s Zak, his chilled voice startling against his brother’s already fever pitched skin. “School’s okay, Mom’s okay, Kara’s okay from what I’ve seen of her, Ethan’s good,” A slightly higher voice there and a pause, then, “He says to tell you he’s excellent. And, um, Lee, I’m dropping Vipers.”

The list, the jumping around means it takes him a few seconds to catch up, but if he’s honest this is a conversation Lee has been anticipating for at least a year, and he hopes the things he’s imagined saying come out right in the moment. “Decided on a different specialization?” It’s rehearsed, and Lee hopes it straddles the delicate line between knowing Zak was edged out and acting like he doesn’t. 

“Oh, um, yeah I’m switching to engineering full time, I transferred into FTL & Thermal Reactor Engine for this semester.”

“So, you’re saying I won’t be able to understand what you’re talking about ever again?”

“What, you don’t want to hear about my readings on microcerulised polythermic plastics?” He laughs, and a low voice barely makes the com audio, but Lee hopes it’s Ethan’s reassurances as well, because this man has been good for his brother in ways he did not anticipate.

“Absolutely not.” 

“What about quantated cerebic ores?

“Only if you want to make my brain drip out of my ears.”

A little muffled, “I am not making up words, babe.” A suspiciously long silence. 

“Will it take longer to finish?” 

Another second, then slightly breathless. “Ah, probably not? I’m talking to my new advisor Friday about writing a paper over the next couple of semesters so I can transfer some of my tactics credit into Interstellar Physics 200 and a seminar on Airframe Stress, but it should be fine.” 

“And when you graduate you’ll tell those frakkers who designed the cockpit to stop putting the tachometer right on top of the altimeter?”

“I’ll make it my first priority.” He laughs, and Lee’s head drops back against the wall, tension draining out of him with every sound echoing from the com’s speaker. 

He spreads his legs, extends his ankles, smiles. “You’re not missing anything living on a battlestar, I’ll tell you that. Frakking miserable up here. Tell Ethan he should transfer too.” 

“Lee says you should get out of Vipers too.” 

Ethan sotto voce comes over the mic. “Not a chance.” 

Lee wants to ask about Kara. Ethan’s one of her nuggets, and he thinks it’d feel like being with her to hear someone talk about her. But then, of course Ethan doesn’t think about Kara like that, probably calls her God. He must see her completely differently.

The thought shoots a bolt of longing straight through him, and he remembers Kara’s never mind several days before, thinks, hopes he’ll be seeing her soon. 

“Sounds like you’ve got better things to do than entertain your brother’s bored ass on a battlestar, Zak, go have fun.” 

The reticence Zak puts forth is equal parts guilt and gladness to be off the com, but he does say goodbye, and there’s only a split second for longing before the light on the com is flashing again and Lee is picking it up, his heart grasping out before him with hope that it’s Kara, let it be Kara. 

“Adama.” 

“What, you have another woman planetside I don’t know about?” 

“Zak.” Her silence belies what he already knew. 

“How’s he holding up?”

“I, um, okay I guess. What...he didn’t say what happened.”

“I…” The sound of her breath echoes between his ears. “Kellison, my co-, he asked Colonel Hart to recommend Zak transfer out of Vipers.”

“He seemed okay about it. I mean, better than I expected.”

“Yeah. Um, I think Cadet Mathis probably helped. I, well I let him out of class early today. It...it seemed like the thing to do.” Then she’s silent. For long enough that he wonders if she’s closed the relay. But the light is still on, so he shifts his hips, brings his legs up again closer to himself, settles his elbows on his knees and waits. 

“You’re not disappointed?”

“Why would I be disappointed?”

“I don’t know, Zak always said your dad was pretty hardass about flying, I wanted to get him there.”

“You’re a teacher, Kara, not a God. You did as much as you could do for him.”

“Thanks.” Her voice is huddling in the corner, wishing it hadn’t been seen, and another shard of his heart fractures off and settles near his feet.

“I wish I were there.”

“Me too.” A pause just long enough to swallow some air and she’s surfacing. “How’d your game go Sunday?” 

“Lost.” He brings his right hand up to his mouth, bites at the edge of his pointer finger nail.

“Oh boo hoo, need a hankie?”

“Actually, I was ahead for part of the game.” 

Her voice swings around him like a ball caroming through the air. “Nice! What moves did you throw?” 

“I’m trying to focus on execution relays, but it’s frakking hard with so much going on.”

“Gotta take it like flying.” She says, and her voice is that cadence of pithy retribution he loves, and he closes his eyes to imagine her face animated, her hands moving, her left shoulder leaning just slightly closer to him. “Even if you don’t have a sim run lined up where it’s the perfect time to execute, you have to focus, eyes on the prize, don’t just spool into something you think might be cool. That’ll come once you’ve got the basics.” 

“I know.” 

“I will say practice is one area where flying and pyramid are completely unlike frakking.” She purrs, and his imagination has shifted from her face to her body in boxers and her trademark black sports bra, one hand just at the crest of her hipbone. The dull tone signaling the end of their call picks up in the background. “What was the score.” 

“Sixty-five, fifty-eight.”

“Hey, tell me when you score sixty-nine. I’ll make it worth your while.”

His groan is equal parts exasperation and desire. “My pleasure.” 

“Sure will be.” 

In his mind's eye, her hand has dipped below the waistband of her boxers, not touching just yet, but certainly tempting. She’s been tamer than a normal Tuesday, but the sound of her voice is almost enough to get him going these days. 

“Hey, um, do you have a berth on Ouranos?” 

“I, ah, I was probably going to crash in the transfer rack.” 

“Book a berth.” 

“Kara?”

“Talk to you Thursday.” And she’s gone.

The image, though, of her in her boxers and bra lounging on a wide, white-swathed bed with an asteroid belt arrayed through the window behind her lingers with him for days.

~ ~

When he disembarks from the raptor at Ouranos, her smile is as wide as the Martok Valley and she takes a running leap onto him with only just enough distance to cover that Lee can drop his bag and brace himself. 

The three pilots and four deck crew filing out around him probably take a step back and a sideways glance, but his eyes are locked on her, and soon his tongue is too busy for him to contemplate any second looks he might be getting, because Kara.

She pulls back for just long enough to suck in a breath of air. “I’ve missed you.” She dives back into him before he can respond. Her fingers are running across his scalp, blunt nails dragging in counterpoint to the sliding, nipping hurricane of her mouth. This nearby her eyes are luminous, her pupils blown, her groin resting just close enough to his that as she loosens her legs from around his hips, shifts to settle back on the deck, he can feel her warmth in excruciating ways against him, it pulses through his spine, his temples, his cheekbones. She wraps her hand around his and tugs. 

Lee resists. “My bag.” 

She glowers back at him then laughs. “You’re not going to need any of that.” 

~ ~

The halls on the satellite are straight in a way that feels out of place in space. Space means curves and arcs and aerodynamicity in an unyielding way that causes winding corridors and oddly-placed stairways and efficiency of design. 

It would be hard to press Kara against the curved bulkheads of a corridor on Columbia, there are no nooks or crannies in which to reacquaint himself with the sweetness of her skin, to suck at the knob of bone where her jaw meets her neck, to explore her curves with his fingertips, to bite her earlobe and curse her choice to wear clothes. 

She’s still holding his hand when they reach the hatch to the berth he reserved, but lets it go to fish a key from her pocket, nudge it through the lock. The hatch is just wider than her hips and he follows her through, closes the door behind them and leans against it to watch her. There are things he’s forgotten. She is precise where his imagination had painted her as languid, she pauses before turning to face him and the only pauses he’d imagined for her were those of his own indecision. Sketching her out in his mind happened in fits and starts, but her actions were taken without hesitation. 

But of course, no, it rolls back on him in waves as he breathes air alongside her: she is human, she is confident at times in a way that’s gaudy — just slightly beyond the norms — but she is impulsive enough to do things about which she is hesitant before lurching to cover them up. And he knows he has those tendencies too, though it’s his way to wait to act until his confidence and the situation in which it will seem natural occur in conjunction. 

“I, ah…” Her fingers lift to her lapel, begin loosening the buttons. 

His hands are there to stop hers before he notices himself entering her sphere, and he backs up just as suddenly. The moment is pregnant with an awkward, new kind of dance between them. The times they’ve been together before have been bubbles, and this one is unfamiliar. “Can I just…” Lee’s voice catches in his throat. “Can I just look at you for a second? Kara?”

“Drink it up, Apollo.” She’s smiling, a familiar joke in her eyes, and she squares up to him, moves with a lazy precision into parade rest. Her eyes rake across him, showy and hungry and he tries to memorize the curves of her as she falls out of her posture and takes two steps to reach him. He takes in the shifting of her muscles too, and then she’s pulling at his buttons, shoving his blues over his shoulders. Her hands skim down over his pecs, catch on his nipples, ripple over his abs and begin on his pants. He toes off his shoes and cooperates by pulling his tanks over his head. Then her bent head begins working his collarbone, lower, and she pulls his pants off, but leaves his boxers, presses the palm of her hand into his already jumping cock. “I want you to frak me now. Hard. And we can pick up on the flowery shit later.” 

He’s happy to oblige; the moments looking at her, her scent, the feel of her lips on his skin reassure him that he does remember this, that she is the same woman, that he hasn’t put more on her than she deserves, and then he’s shoving her back onto the bed, climbing atop her. Her grin is wide open, gleeful, egging him on, so he shoves a leg between hers and isn’t careful as he pushes her t-shirt over her head. He edges his knee under her ass to give him the leverage to tug her pants down, and as the pressure of his leg changes, she gives a peaked grunt that clenches hard inside him.

Then she’s bare and rutting against him, frantic. He shifts his legs, leans forward, pulls her torso flush with his and her legs come around him until they’re meeting, and like that, she’s enveloping him. Her head is thrown back for a second before it comes forward, tilts and begins sucking, licking, panting against his mouth, one hand clutching his back, the other grasping for his hand. Kara interlaces their fingers and pulses above him as he thrusts upward, rocking her. 

And of course it’s over too fast, she tries unsuccessfully to hide a grin as he empties himself into her, shoulders shuddering against hers, hand gripping. Gasping against her mouth, “Sorry, I’m sorry.” 

“So make it up to me.” She drags him with her as she lays back, throws one leg over the bedspread and hooks the other around his leg. He isn’t sure where he wants to begin, whether he wants to see her face, or taste her. She clenches around him as he begins to withdraw, so he stays, reaches between them and slides a finger around her lips, her body glistening below him, breaths pushing her skin closer to his, then retracting away. 

“You’re so beautiful.” He says on an exhale, his fingers bumping against her clit, brushing the base of his cock. His fingers rock against his pubic bone, and her gasps and grunts are buzzing his neurons. He’s as on edge as he was before he even touched her, maybe more. He’s working her gently, slowly, relishing her every noise, disappointed in himself, but pleased at the moments it’s given him to absorb her. The noises she makes now are different than when they’re on a relay: quieter, breathier, but her face is more expressive than he has been imagining, her eyes wide and frenzied, ricocheting between his face, his chest, his hand, the ceiling. Her mouth is open just so, her teeth barely exposed. 

Her grip on his hand is tightening, tightening ever so slightly until it’s a vise, her back arching her hips into his, and he’s only slightly surprised to find himself ready again. He draws his hips back, slicker now, the friction of her fluttering around him. The warmth, and the wetness, and the pressure of her is so encompassing, and then she’s falling apart, the tension climaxing then just as suddenly draining out of her, and he’s slowly, slowly moving within her, his hand resting over her pubic bone, pressing and releasing slowly. His desire is building none too slowly, but her eyes are closed, her lips forming just a hint of a smile. He can’t help but kiss her, nip the corner of her mouth, lick a stripe up her neck, draw her earlobe into his mouth and scrape his canines across it. 

“Mmmm.” Kara brings her hand over his, shoulders loosening with this pleasure, too — less driving, less needy. He feels like he’s drowning, things outside the sphere of their bodies completely unnecessary. They are floating in space, suspended, molecules joined, transferring electrons, one magnetic field, locked into each other, rocking, shaking, lost. 

And there, in the crease of her neck, is a scent he hadn’t explicitly remembered, the combination of her sweat, his saliva and the pungent glow of her arousal. Smelling it, smelling it on her skin, with his nose just brushing the precise, velvety texture of her flesh, he wishes in a way that this was the last moment he would ever experience. 

Her fingertips ghost over his spine, and he hopes that the percentage of her body he is covering with his is on the safe side of the line between feeling adored and feeling trapped. “So help me, Lee, I will rip your balls off if you’re asleep.”

He lifts up on one elbow, tangles a hand through her hair. “I don’t think I could sleep right now if I tried.”

“Seems like part of you could?”

“Adult human male, Kara.” 

She looks away at that, to the right and then down at the space between them. “I think about Zak sometimes.” She says, and he tries to stay calm, not to start, but his stomach lurches and his arms, his back are ripe with tension. “I don’t mean...not like that. But I think how it’s different than being with Zak.”

“Oh.” 

“You’re a much better lay.” Her voice is jovial but forced and her hand comes up to smooth his hair back from his forehead. She’s still not looking at him, but her hand meanders over his back until it comes to rest on his arm and he thinks of the number of times he saw her or Zak reach for each other’s hands. Can’t come up with a single one. 

“I love you, Kara.” And maybe he’s picking things up from her because he knew he shouldn’t say it, that he should give it another couple of months, maybe a year, maybe longer. But then she’s looking at him and he wonders if he somehow earned favor with the gods, because he may have a slight knack with this woman, a lucky spark for saying the right thing to her. Her smile is wide and pleased like she’s just won a bet. 

“You are a cocky bastard, aren’t you?”

“I, uh…” 

Her eyes are sparkling, egging him on. “There’s no takebacks, Adama.”

“I wasn’t going to.” And he swallows her smile in a kiss and tries not to think about when or whether she might say it back. 

~ ~

Despite their best intentions, at the twelve hour mark they’ve both been awake for going on twenty-eight. They’re eating one of the best dinners he’s had off of plates balanced between their knees and he doesn’t have the energy to summon words up from the tangled depths of his consciousness. She’s yawning between every bite and it makes him want to bite the corner of her mouth but he can’t summon the energy to even lean half the distance between them. With a final burst of energy he shifts both of their plates to the sideboard, grabs his alarm and says “Six hours,” as he pulls her to the bed.

She’s nodding and nuzzling his throat, and he half-heartedly shoves her pants down her legs while peeling his off as well. Her skin is warm and damp and slightly sweet smelling against him, and they drop immediately into sleep. 

He wakes with a start what the clock tells him is two hours later, afraid that they’ve wasted more of the short hours they have together than planned, and settles back into the circle of Kara’s arms when he realizes that no, there’s more time to sleep and more time together and the adrenaline-fueled hours come back to him in waves, she’s completely relaxed, peaceful. In a way it’s the best moment of the past fourteen hours, to be with her in a way that doesn’t feel frantic and constrained and terrifying. It’s better than nothing, this being with her in the middle of space, fulfilling the time-honored role of soldier on leave, horny and lonely and desperate. But being with a prostitute like that is one thing, and being with the woman he loves gives him an edge of unreality, gives her the shape of a necessity, a discordant pain that this is not who he should be whether with her or without her. 

For an hour, he props his head up on his hand and just looks at her and tries to remember what it felt like to experience her with the openness of time, with the options of Caprica pulsing around him, and he’s hitting on it with a soothing frequency as he nods off. 

~ ~

The next morning he wakes up in his rack, without her, and something inside of him is left dangling in the dry air. Today is no CAP, no drills, nothing to report to, nothing to do, and yet here he is, on a battlestar instead of a satellite, picking at the tiny spot of peeling paint above his head in the rack, wrapping her tank around his hand, breathing it in. And it feels pathetic that having her should make everything else around him crumble like this. Because wasn’t this good enough before? Wasn’t it fine to be wasting his time on a battlestar for no frakking reason? 

He’s in and out of the showers before he thinks about it, pulling on his blues, combing his hair, locking his face in a line. Sergeant Calio’s office is just outside the brig, and every low ranking enlisted and NCO on this hunk of junk think of her job as nothing short of misery, juggling paper and shuffling bodies. Lee knocks on the hatch, twice, sharp and polite. “Come in.” 

“Sergeant Calio, sir.” Lee enters at a salute, it’s easy, this part, it’s always been easy, the strictures, and he’s suddenly slightly frozen at the office he’s standing in, the reason he’s standing there. 

“Lieutenant...Adama, is it?” Sergeant Calio is in blues, hair in a tight bun, neck straight and the smile on her face in contrast to all of that, gentle, pleasant, she gestures with the back of her hand to close the door and he does. “What can I do for you?” 

“I’d like to begin the process of requesting an official separation, sir.” 

Calio is no longer looking at him, but at the table in front of her, she lifts her head, “Sit down, Lieutenant,” and turns her shoulders just a hair toward the screen in front of her. The keys click rhythmically for a moment before scrolling through the text, eyebrows quirking just slightly as she reads. 

His shins are itching, the balls of his feet resisting the urge to hop, his hands rest placidly on the arms of the chair, legs folded 90 degrees at the knee, posture steady, steady.

“What’s the reason for the request?” Her eyes are skipping between his face and the screen and for a while she doesn’t say anything, just watches.

“Permission to speak freely, sir?” She nods. “I don’t intend to be career fleet. I’ll have fulfilled my active duty obligation in two months. I need to get out before this seems like the only option.” The words come out of him as though he’s known these truths forever. They’re smooth and scripted and realizing them as he says them is as satisfying as solving a puzzle. 

“Well, then.” Calio taps a key on her console, a printer buzzes under her desk and she retrieves three sheets of paper, passes them across the table. “I’ll need those within the week if you want to enter reserves before your next assignment.” She picks up a different sheaf of papers as Lee stands, snaps into his salute. “Dismissed.” 

“Thank you, sir.” 

~ ~

Knife nudges him through the rack curtain, “You’ve got a call, Apollo.” 

The bunkroom is dark, the minute cacophony of his squadron’s sleep echoing the hulls. “Adama. Com 3 open?” 

“Yes, sir.”

“Twenty seconds.”

“Copy.” 

He slots the receiver into its holder, opens the hatch and ducks into the com closet directly next to the bunkroom. 

“Adama.” 

“Patching through.” 

“Copy.” 

“No woman is worth throwing your career away for, Lee.” His father. Of course.

“That’s not what this is about, Dad.”

“Then what it is about? You’re twelve, maybe sixteen months from Captain, CAG, you could command one day.”

“I don’t want to command, Dad. That’s what it’s about. I’ve never wanted that and I never will.”

“The cost of wearing the uniform can be high, Lee, but it’s a cost you chose. You know the reasons we do this. You know the value.” There’s a port on three, and Lee sees a late shift marine on patrol, gun at his shoulder, stride lazy and long. 

“Do I? What is the value of sitting in a hunk of metal in space for eleven months, fuel rations, peacetime maneuver limitations, two hours a week of training, hunting for booze every time it comes into commissary, the gym, triad, whores, the brig. That’s what we’re accomplishing. That’s all we’re accomplishing.” 

“Lee, war isn’t over.”

“We’re not at war now, Dad. I can’t live like we are.” The line is silent for a moment and as much as he wants to say something damning, something about growing up with his father in the fleet and his mother alone and what it was like living in that house, that family, it’s not the time, not the place, not that it ever will be. 

“You’re going to regret making this decision.”

“I’ll talk to you later, Dad.” 

As soon as the light on top of the link goes off, he picks up again, presses the button to reach the com officer. “Can you connect me to Caprica, 91-834-4162-63?”

It rings eight times, and she’s groggy and obviously pissed when she answers. “Thrace.”

“Kara.” 

“You better have a good reason for waking me up, loverboy.”

“I requested a separation today.”

“A what?” 

“I’m transferring to the reserves.”

“Uh…”

“I’m sick of being up here. It’s frakking miserable. I need to do something else.”

“Uh, wow…Lee…I…” Then nothing, three breaths, still nothing. 

“Fall asleep again?”

“What? No. I, uh, I don’t know. What do you want me to say?”

Her reticence draws him up, tightly wound, no longer sitting in that state between dreams and waking where he could be confident and fearless. Because somehow, he knew he would disappoint his father, but he hoped she’d be happy, even if she was confused. And now he’s silent, contemplating hyperventilating, seconds from hanging up.

“Lee?”

“Never mind. Go back to sleep. I’ll talk to you later.” Still clinging to the phone though, hoping for something, heart in his throat, pounding a frantic tattoo against his larynx. 

“No. Lee. I’m...it’s good. Okay?” Her voice is reedy, pressing through a tight throat, teeth clenched.

His heartbeat calms, slows, steadies itself rockily back into the hollow of his chest. “Okay.”

Then, for a while, they just breathe, and the distinct catching sound of her almost-but-not-quite snoring pings his consciousness as he, too, deepens his breath, nods into unconsciousness. And the humming tone ending their call begins so quietly, so slightly that he’s not startled but wakes as if to a sunrise. 

“Kara.”

Her noise is just as though she’s rolled towards him in bed, part whimper, part moan, so encompassing and sensual that Lee thinks that this is the best call they’ve had these past three months because that sound wraps him in her, brings back the brush of her calf against his hip, her hand resting warmly against his ribs, her lips brushing his neck. 

“Go back to bed, Kara, I’ll call you tomorrow.” 

“‘Night, Lee.”

He settles the receiver back into the cradle, gently, and stays in the closet, eyes closed, head leaning against the outside bulkhead. He hopes she falls asleep on the sofa, weighed down by sleep and thinking of him with her. 

There are moments when he’s with her that he thinks of Zak, too. Wishes that he were as fearless as his brother. Wishes he knew how to play a messy, beautiful game with Kara Thrace, could match her move for reckless move. He wishes that he had something to prove to himself. Because it’s clear that outside of being showy, being cocky, being a pilot, she doesn’t like people trying to prove themselves to her. She seems convinced everything will come tumbling down around her and when that happens, she doesn’t want to be the one left holding someone’s heart. 

~ ~

The day Lee gets his release papers he’s immediately on the phone with Left Hook, a senior pilot who mustered out to Caprica after his wife died having their third. Every pilot off Columbia who’s mustered out for the past two years has landed on their feet thanks to Hook. It’s not a great job, not what he wants to be doing, but it’s a start. 

“Apollo, you’re golden, a couple more hoops and your signing bonus will land in your account and you won’t have anything to worry about except how many times you want to take me out for a drink.” 

“Thanks Hook.”

“Happy to help, brother. See you when you land.”

“See you there.” Lee laughs, and the line goes dead.

No matter how he looks at it, outside of the fleet all flying jobs are essentially cargo work. Moving goods or bodies from one city or one planet to the next. One way or return, the differences between civilian flight and fleet flight don’t cast a positive light on life outside of the military. Unless you’re flying a live-in liner and then you’ve got the same problems as a battlestar only tighter and quieter. Then again, he’s pretty sure he won’t be in it for the long haul, and it’s a good living.

His bags are packed, he’s got almost two weeks left on Columbia, one week of debrief and counseling on Libran and then Caprica. The only non-regulation item still tacked up against his bulkhead is a picture of Kara. His extra socks and BDUs are turned into the quartermaster or tucked away underneath his civvies. He’s running on fumes, scattering the ephemera of shipboard life behind him and it’s exhilarating, like a run on a crisp fall day, breath frosting his lungs, clouding the air, full of possibility. 

The light is flashing red for Kara and he’s sliding the com to his ear smoothly. “Adama.” 

“Remind me how many days until I can frak you again?”

“Twenty. Nineteen if you bring coffee.” 

“I’ll bring amphetamines if you promise not to turn into a vibrator. Then again...” 

He groans because frak her for being consistent: it’s Tuesday and there are no fewer than four other pilots in the bunkroom. And then frak it, because why _not_ give as good as he gets? There are only so many more days he’ll have to wake up to their sideways glances. He lowers his voice, imagines her like he always does, bra, shorts, sultry eyes. “You’d like that, huh?” 

Her laugh is evil, giddy, triumphant. “Oh Lee, I knew you had it in you.”

“Bet you wish you had it in you instead.” Which is too far because he’s almost laughing now and Sidewinder is giving him a look across the room that says he’s not being as clever as he thinks, but that’s fine because Kara’s humming is ripe with that waver of arousal he’s now so familiar with. 

They’re together, not saying anything for ten, twenty seconds before she says, “What’s the first thing you want to do after you get back?” 

“Other than…” 

“Yes, other than frakking my brains out.”

“I think...go for a hike? Or a road trip?” Something he couldn’t do on a battlestar, something expansive.

“I know a good spot for a hike, big old glacier lake, nice little cave behind a waterfall. It’ll probably be warm enough to swim once you land.” 

“Sounds nice.” 

“It’s beautiful.” He thinks he can hear her pushing her hand through her hair, imagines her ankle wiggling as it dangles over the side of the sofa. 

“You’re beautiful.” 

“You can’t even see me.” 

“It’s still true.” 

“You know I’m already taking you home with me, right?” 

He laughs. “Maybe I’m trying to get you to let me stay.” 

She’s silent, and he realizes that he has maybe put too many cards on the table then, “Listen, I, uh...”

“I didn’t mean...I’m planning to get my own place.” 

“You don’t...you don’t have to.” 

But he does have to. For a lot of reasons, if not least because she reminds him of a skittish colt, and he doesn’t want to spook her right when she’s warming up to the idea of him as a weight in her life. Because Zak was basically living with her and he’s not going to just fill in that empty space, because they both need some time to settle apart before they settle together. “I want to. Kara, okay? Not because...not because I don’t want to live with you, but just, it seems too fast. I want us to get used to living on the same planet first, okay?” 

“Okay.” The breath she lets out is relieved, and despite what his brain has been telling him he’s a little disappointed that she’s not fighting him on this one. He’d let her get her way, though, so it’s fine. 

“A hike, a road trip, lots of frakking, meat...what else?” 

“I start my job the second Monday after I get back.” 

“You’re going to be bored out of your mind.” 

“Well aware of that, smartass.” His fingers play across his knee, worry a loose thread in the seam. “My mom’s going to want to meet you.” 

“Do we have to?” 

“It’ll just be weirder the longer we put it off.” 

“I just…” A rustling on the line. “I told Zak not to tell them. He wanted to, you know?” A laugh that cuts him, the line begins to drone behind her words. “That would have been a disaster.” 

“It’s okay, Kara, we’ll figure it out.” At moments like this, he realizes how much easier it is with her when they’re touching, when he can smooth a hand across her shoulder or wrap her up in his arms. Touching her is a panacea for both of them. “Oh, I was thinking I could join a pyramid league or something?”

She laughs. “Good luck with that. I’ll check around but it’s a bitch to get into.” 

“You just want to keep me to yourself.” 

“Oh Apollo, you’re not that good.” 

“I know a pilot on Caprica who might disagree.” 

She hums her agreement, then “Talk to you tomorrow, Lee.” 

“‘Night Kara.” 

~ ~

The fleet transport settles on the strip at the Delphi air base and the soldiers turn their faces toward the windows like flowers seeking light, seeking a glimpse of a beloved’s smile, a flash of their hair, building the anticipation of the sensation of holding them that lingers just outside the ship’s door. 

It’s instinct to turn his head, to search for the curve of her shoulder, the line of her arms tucked behind her back. He shucks the two duffels that comprise his worldly possessions onto his shoulders, disembarks. 

Once his foot hits the ground, he’s a civilian but he can’t shake out of the posture, the rhythm of steps that matches those beside him. He passes the first set of stanchions, the first row of bodies on either side, and he’s searching the crowd like the rest of them, unashamedly angling for that first glimpse of home. 

And there she is, smile engulfing her face, blues unbuttoned at the neck, shoving her way through the crowd toward him. He knows well enough this time to drop his bags before she’s on top of him. Then his hands have more interesting places to be, smoothing the curve of her spine, brushing the tips of her hair, her jawline, her cheekbones. Her mouth is hot and sliding against his and the soldiers streaming around them are nonplussed by their display, one among dozens of electrons slamming into protons, joined irrevocably, finally finished being apart. 

When they’re done ravaging one another the crowd is gone. She leans over to pick up one of his bags and leads him toward the lumbering black mass of her car. She tosses his bag in through the open back window and waits for him to do the same. They too are in synch with one another, matching motion for motion as they’ve done from the beginning, they have certain rhythms and movements ingrained deep within their spinal cords, looping patterns repeated thousands of times.

He pulls open the door, settles into the seat and surrenders to sensation of adrenaline flowing out of him. He needs at least five hours of sleep. Then there’s an earthy, nutty smell and Kara’s eyes are hooded but slightly gleeful. “Couldn’t find any amphetamines.”

She sips from the cup before passing it over, and as he breathes in the scent of the coffee, she turns over the engine and twists herself backward, slings her arm around his seat, heads toward home. 

~ ~

Her apartment is downright tidy when he follows her through the door, settles his bags to the left of the sofa and begins unbuttoning his shirt. She’s doing the same, and he has a cup of coffee in him, but it’s only barely enough to keep him standing. By the time he’s shucking off his pants, she’s leaning against the table, brazen and bare and beautiful. He wants to worship at her altar for the rest of his days and nearly says so. 

Then she’s shoving off, tucking her hands under the waistband of his boxers to graze her knuckles over the veins pulsing against parchment-thin skin below. Her nipples are hard against his chest, and the half smile on her face says she’s ready for anything, that she’s been ready. He takes two steps forward, bumps her into the table and tilts his chin up just enough that her half smile turns into a smirk and she hops up, shoves his shorts to just below his balls and encircles his hips with her smooth legs. 

It’s easy and slow and constricting and light and he feels insubstantial, drawn in pencil lines against a cloud. His pulse is a breeze, her gasps the rustling of leaves, her movements a cottonwood floating down, down, ever down.

Reality filters slowly back, exquisite in its precision. The angle of the sun as it hits her hair, three hairs glistening brighter than the rest, the wine-colored splotches he’s left on her shoulders, the trousers of her blues caught under her ass. He’s here, now, in a way he hasn’t ever been before. And it’s breathtaking, unfathomable, that she’s here too. 

~ ~

There’s a For Rent sign on her building, and it feels like cheating, but he calls the landlord for a tour when she’s at work the next day. Tries it on for size. 

On his salary it’s easy enough to afford, and close enough to the airstrip and of course it’s a stupid idea, the worst possible idea because he already has a key to her place and if he’s honest he’ll be in her lived-in, bright, musky-smelling apartment at least seventy percent of the time if he does it. Even so, it’s appealing. But he’s made a long habit of living by the spirit rather than the letter of the law, so he circles a few other ads in the paper and puts an application in on an apartment six blocks from campus on the other side from her apartment, a clean eight minute walk away.

He stops at the grocery store, stocks up, and when Kara gets home, he’s well into the process of making chili, and her hand trails across his back as she extracts a beer from the fridge, pours a fair bit of it into the chili and kisses him. 

“I could get used to coming home to this.” 

His hands are moving around her waist, thumbs brushing her ribs through her tanks. He raises one eyebrow at her and draws the words out. “Tough luck.”

“How’s the search going?” 

“I applied for a place just across campus on Marlet Street. That place with the blue awnings.”

“Swanky, Mr. Adama.”

“It’s actually surprisingly reasonable.” 

“Well,” Her eyes skitter away from him as she raises her beer and tips it toward him. “Good for you.”

She’s moving away from him and he tightens his grip. “Kara.” Her eyes on him are burning rebelliously, and it cuts him deep. He moves one hand to her shoulder, skims it up her neck to her cheek, guides her forehead in so that it’s touching his. “Listen, I don’t...what do you want me to do?”

She doesn’t say anything, wraps her arms around him. She’s biting the inside of her cheek, tucking her hands into the back pockets of his jeans. “I wouldn’t kick you out.” 

And he’s thinking of something his grandfather said to him, advice he’d rarely taken before Kara. “Okay.”

Then she’s kissing him again, and he doesn’t want anything more than this. He’s shoving at her tanks, undoing the buckle on her trousers, saying nothing but yes, opening himself terrifyingly wide. 

Her hands too are exploring, skimming across his muscles, prodding at his flesh, bumping his t-shirt up over his stomach, dragging her thumbnails across his flushing skin. His fingertips against her back brush the hot surface of the oven and he’s not yet detached enough to forget what that means. “I need to, the soup.” Instead, she turns in his arms, not moving away, but dragging her skin and the open catches of her clothing against him. She turns the knob, then returns to him, steps forward, bumps her shoulder into him so he steps back, then her teeth are laying into his neck, blazing red trails over his skin. Her fingers are unlatching his jeans, shoving them down, and she follows them to the floor, drags her cheek against his groin. 

He groans and she smirks. “You’re so easy, Apollo.” 

“Somehow I don’t feel at all bad about it.” 

She ducks her head to nudge him with her nose and the sensation of it is novel and pleasant and she’s suckling at him through his boxers and he’s watching them get moist and then tented and then wet and her hands are still on his hips and it’s not clear to him whether this is seduction or goading. He’s feeling that desperate edginess of not knowing when or if satisfaction and sensation are going to tip the scales from wanting to having, from grasping to enjoyment and he’s not sure when to let her take the lead. 

His hands on the tendrils of hair loosed from her hair tie are gentle, trying not to force anything, and she takes a second to pause her ministrations, looks up at him in a way that asks him what the frak he’s doing right now, and then her hand is meeting his on the waistband of his boxers, maneuvering the fabric downward, and she’s opening her mouth and swallowing him whole. 

And to be honest, he’s not sure how he feels about seeing her down on her knees like that. It’s hot and he’s not sure if she could do something that would fail to get him off, but there’s a way about it, too, that makes him want to never ask for it. Not that she doesn’t seem to enjoy it, and not that she shouldn’t - for the gods’ sake, he certainly enjoys exploring her with his mouth, but - and oh gods, it’s that thing, that thing she does with her tongue and just the barest hint of teeth, and _okay, just frakking stop it with the navel-gazing Lee, because there are a lot nicer things to be gazing at right now._

Yes, there are. 

Eventually her jaw tires or he’s vibrating with the need to touch her, and they make their way to the bed. The bed is maybe a little bit boring as things go, but it’s definitely just the right surface for frakking: bouncing back just the right amount of give, blankets, pillows to prop him or her or both of them up in a particularly inventive position. She guides him backward and climbs atop him, slides down over him, closes her eyes, tenses her thighs, rises up like a selkie, cresting and breaking. 

He matches her rhythm, eyes meandering over her body, one hand resting and steadying her hips, the other seeking her pleasure with sure, steady strokes. 

She is the dawn. Language fails him under the blossoming rise and fall of her, the hypnotic movement of her breasts, the play of the muscles in her stomach. 

He’s sure they’re both making those indelible noises, writing each other’s pleasure on the walls of their chests, and he can only hear her groans, her whimpering gasps, her “Oh Gods, yes, Lee, oh frak, right there, yes…” as she drops her chest onto him, wraps her legs around his thighs and pulls him to the side. Then he’s on top, and maybe this is his favorite way to make love to her, because when she’s on top she’s a goddess, beautiful and outrageously sexy, but unreachable, but here, this way, she’s his. 

He slows their pace, brings their kisses to a less fevered pitch, brushing her bottom lip with the tip of his tongue, sucking her earlobe into his mouth, and she’s cursing him for just a moment before she’s breaking apart. Her mouth reaches for his throat, open and wide and wet and he follows her down.

When their breaths stabilize, she nudges him with her elbow. “You’re heavy, Lee.” But as he moves to shift away, to pull out of her, she’s gasping, arms locking him in place. 

“Did you just…” 

“Aftershocks, Lee, frak.” She’s panting just a bit and he wants to see her face. He lifts up to his elbows. Her eyes are closed, face open and beautiful. He shifts his hips just a bit and the muscles slacken, her teeth digging into her bottom lip, a groan ripping its way out of her throat. 

“Should I…”

“Oh, gods, no, just stay there, it’s, ungh, it’s good.” 

When she opens her eyes, after she’s stopped twitching and moaning, she smirks at his grin and smacks him on the arm. “Oh shut up.”

“So, how often does that happen?” 

She makes a noise but doesn’t say anything. He doesn't push. It was certainly gratifying, and he has no desire whatsoever to dissuade her from further occurrences. 

On his elbows, watching her tense, restive face, he doesn't want to hold himself back again for the thousandth time, and "I love you" rolls solidly out of his mouth. 

She’s silent, smiling quietly beneath the residual tension of her pleasure. She pulls him down so he’s resting atop her, covering her wholly, and hums into his ear, mouth pressing chastely against the side of his neck. 

~ ~

It’s a delicate next few days. He comes back from observing the practice of a club pyramid team to find three drawers in the bedroom open and empty. “You know I don’t have this many clothes, right?”

“Not planning on buying more?” 

He finds her glaring at her easel one afternoon, head cocked, and slides behind her to mouth her neck. “What’re you thinking?” 

“I...I don’t want you here when I’m painting.” 

“Okay.” 

She turns in his arms, studies his face. “Unless I’m painting you.” 

“Fair enough.”

“That’s okay with you?” 

“Why not?” 

“It doesn’t seem really fair, if you’re living here.” 

“I suspect I’ll kick you out sometimes too, Kara.” He brushes his cheek against hers.

“Who said that’d be allowed?”

“Tacit understanding.” She’s bristling, so he finds a patch of her skin under his tongue, breathes in the scent of her tucked between her jaw and her neck.

The following Thursday after work, he picks her up from campus and they drive to the fleet storage division and load his six medium boxes into the back of her jeep.

“This seriously all you have?” 

“You store a lot when you were on a battlestar?” 

She quirks her lips down at the corners, raises an eyebrow. “I’m not throwing my shit away if you think yours is better.”

“Okay.” 

Things are cleaner than he’s ever seen her place. Her legs grow tiny scratchy hairs overnight that he finds somehow endearing as they tickle him awake in the mornings. She gets home early some days, throws something on the grill or into a pot. She finds him clipping his nails into the toilet one morning and smirks. He finds tiny piles of her fingernail clippings on her nightstand, on the coffee table. She goads him into running before class. He sees her eyeing her paints some weekend afternoons and asks her if she wants him to go out. She still doesn’t say she loves him, but her slow smiles in the slanting light of the afternoon are a rich recompense.

~ ~

His first reserve weekend starts at the base and ends in the Arebos Asteroid belt, spinning into maneuver after maneuver, shooting up designated chunks of rock, meeting the men and women in his unit. 

It’s actually a frakking beautiful thing, serving with these men and women who know something about what they’re working to protect, even if their knowledge of the limitations of that protection is keener than most. 

Zela Parkman is a fey dark-haired woman, crackshot in the sims, reminds him a little bit of Starbuck, except that she has two kids back on Caprica and goes by the slightly unfortunate callsign _Hover_. She’s been in reserves for seven rotations and works for a law firm with a robust pro-bono program targeting Fleet Veterans. Zela is in the bunk above him on Arebos station and burns her light out paging through a thick binder that took up half of her carry bag. When the light sputters she curses with enough vitriol to have him shooting up in his bunk. 

It’s whispered: “You okay?” 

“Fine. Just the frakking light.” 

“You should be sleeping anyway.” 

“I have a deposition Monday, I can’t...godsdamnit.” 

“Trade you?” The blink of his light sears his eyes and he stands. “Sheets are practically fresh.” 

The binder closes with a slight tick and her legs emerge from above him. “Thank you.” 

“No problem.” 

The curve of the station causes the upper bunks to be slightly shorter, and his knees cramp in the cockpit the next day because of the contortions he took to sleep, but Zela sits next to him on the shuttle back to Caprica that evening, and he hadn’t been sure how unit solidarity was formed in the reserves, but it seems to be working out for him just fine. 

~ ~

Zela’s not that far away, it turns out, in a suburb of Delphi, and works about two miles from the Fleet Academy. It takes nearly three months to get her and her husband and Kara all pinned down to a date, but they get together for drinks. Kurt pulls him away with some thinly veiled excuse Zela doubtless rehearsed with him to get her and Kara alone together. Kurt, it turns out, was a reservist until their first kid was born, a deck technician, and he works for Kippling and Marnet, one of the fleet’s largest ship suppliers. “It’s frakking irritating, right, to see techs on my line cutting corners that took me six hours on a shift to fix up when I was on Uned. It’s easy enough to bend a wing tail two more degrees with a hydraulic plier. You have to do it with a sling and a wedge on a battlestar for a whole squadron of ships and you’ve got a frakking full time job. That shit’s never going to end.” 

Lee’s put in a fair number of maintenance hours himself, but never on that kind of work. “I thought I had it bad with patching lines and replacing fuses.” 

“Man, you don’t even know what deck work is. It’s amazing. It’s like making a sculpture with spit and paperclips, disgusting, frustrating work, but when you get it right it’s beautiful.” Then he raises his glass. “That is, when the ships are being flown and there’s shit to do.” 

“So say we all.” They both raise their glasses to their lips. 

“You and Kara on a ship together?” 

“Funny story actually. We were, but we didn’t meet until later. She was…” He looks over at her and the expression on her face is the midpoint between discomfort and humor. He wonders if she’s telling the same story. “I may have stolen her from my brother.” 

Kurt laughs then, punches Lee on the shoulder. “Looks like she didn’t mind.” 

Kara is smiling at him across the bar and it’s a smile that says any and everything from “I’m going to frak you silly tonight” to something so tender and encompassing that he can only call it love, even though he would never say it aloud. 

Back at the table Kara and Zela are at that point of female acquaintanceship that catapults between rivalry and friendship, and when he and Kurt return, Kara lays a kiss on Lee that can only be called possessive, and while he doesn’t mind having her tongue in his mouth under normal circumstances, it feels as though it might not quite be the right moment for it. So he pulls away as naturally as he can and looks over to find Zela and Kurt also locking lips. 

~ ~

It’s interesting to have friends. He’s had squadron members and shipmates and subordinates, but none of them ever really felt like friends and Zela and Kurt become, unequivocally, friends. 

It’s obvious that Kara’s uncomfortable with the idea of having friends who are a couple, as a couple. He's not sure if it's because it's a new concept for her to be with someone in a way that can be out in the open, or if it’s because as far as he can tell she hasn’t got many friends around who didn’t start out as drinking buddies and remain fairly close to that description.

Zela and Kurt invite them over one afternoon for a barbeque and Kara is amazing with Marina and Lyle, playing house and toy soldiers and spinning around with Lyle balanced on her arms so he feels like he’s flying. She demurs when Zela suggests that they should babysit sometime in the near future, but Lee says yes. 

In the car, on the way home. “I don’t like kids, Lee.” 

“Could have fooled me.” 

“No, I mean…” She pulls the car over, nestles in between two other cars to park, turns to him. “I don’t want to have kids.” 

Her hands are moving over the lowest button on her shirt, eyes cast down. Her posture says defensive and afraid so clearly he’s not sure what to do. It’s a mood he’s learned over the past few months of living with her, or maybe it’s a series of moods, because nothing he does gets the same reaction out of her twice. 

He reaches for her hand, pulls it towards himself and leans over just enough that he doesn’t jostle her posture, kisses her fingers, breathes in her skin. “Okay.” 

She breathes out in a shuddering sigh, turns to him. “I’m not going to change my mind about this.” 

“I’m not asking you to.” 

“I just…” The hand he’s holding goes limp then alive again. “I’m not _ever_ going to change my mind. I need you to know that.” 

“It’s okay.” 

“Your brother...frak, this is the worst godsdamn way to say this to you. I never...I didn’t tell Zak this because, I guess because I didn’t think he was the type who’d want to get married and have kids and buy the house with the porch swing.” She bites out a bitter laugh and he realizes that of course it’s not that Zela and Kurt are their friends or that they’re a couple, it’s that they’re a version of a future she doesn’t want. “You are.” 

“Having kids is the last thing I’m thinking about.”

“But you will.” 

“Kara...” He lets go of her hand and leans his head against the headrest, closes his eyes. He false starts a few times, then shakes his head. “I don’t want to talk about this, okay? I...you’re not wrong. But you’re not right. My parents...they weren’t good parents. And I think we’d do a better frakking job than they did, but it’s…” He feels her shaking, opens his eyes to see her gritting her teeth, tears welling in the corners of her eyes. Wishes they weren’t in a car, wishes he were holding her. He steadies his voice, or tries. “I don’t want to take the chance and end up putting a kid through that.” 

She nods, tightly, once, and then, slowly, her muscles relax. When she’s breathing again she looks over at him. “How’d you get to be the perfect frakking guy, Lee?” She swipes her hand underneath both her eyes and shifts back into drive. 

~ ~

When they get home, she pulls out her brushes and paints and when he stands to grab his book off the kitchen table she tells him to stay.


End file.
